Thursday, October 22, 2009

Highlights from SharePoint 2010 - from SPC2009

I'm here at Microsoft's SharePoint Conference 2009 with lots of cool info about SharePoint 2010. I will start by saying the new release is cool. Lots of annoying things about 2007 have been fixed, and there's lots of useful information.

I thought I'd quickly list out some of the highlights that I hold dear...

You've probably seen this already - the Ribbon interface is EVERYWHERE. This includes all web part pages, publishing pages, list forms, and admin pages. Like it or loathe it, you probably should embrace it or get out of the Microsoft Office ecosystem.

A new Dialog Framework has been introduced, so editing item properties does not take you away from where you were. Interestingly (perhaps lazily?) this has been implemented via an absolutely positioned div tag with an iframe inside - the UI benefits for users on this is tremendous (IMO)

SharePoint and SQL need to run on 64 bit operating systems

The requirements for SQL is 2005 SP2 or 2008 SP1 Cumulative Updates 2 or later

You can now design web parts as ASP.NET Server Controls (.ascx files)

Web parts are being moved away from legacy "WSS" Web Part APIs, and instead everyone is encouraged to develop web parts against the ASP.NET WebPart class. WSS will still be supported in 2010, but are being phased out

If you're into making your own Office documents (.docx, .xlsx, etc), the Office Open XML SDK has a new version (v2) which means no more creating XML yourself - all operations are done via the API.